Practice Management FAQs

Legal Practice Management is the commitment to a design of processes and procedures that enable a law firm to achieve its business goals and objectives. Legal Practice Management encompasses four core areas: Marketing/Business Development, Technology, Finance and Management. This fourth core area, Management, is the one most-often misunderstood and neglected, and most often the cause for frustration amongst attorneys and staff. The Management piece involves taking all of the Marketing/Business Development, Technology and Finance tools implemented to run the business, and making sure that the day-to-day workflow is optimized, efficient and goal-oriented with a dedication to support, training and oversight.

Who is the typical client?

Newly-formed law firms

Law firms going through change in Executive Management

Law firms experiencing growth pains

Why do I need to engage a Legal Practice Management Consultant?

It is not uncommon for a law firm that has undertaken a case management system restructuring to suffer with post-implementation challenges during the transition phase. This often results in a loss of attorney and paralegal productivity, lack of standardization and continuity, and overall confusion. This can lead to disillusionment and frustration. The role of the Legal Practice Management consultant is to address these challenges by:

Assessing current Firm processes and procedures;

Leveraging industry-proven Lean methodologies, make recommendations for workflow process redesign to serve the individual needs of the Firm and to best leverage the new infrastructure; and

Develop a sustainable change-management plan to help stabilize efficiency gains.

What does a typical consultative engagement cost? How are the services delivered?

Legal Practice Management services can be delivered on an hourly or flat-fee basis, and is best determined once the full scope of the project is identified and understood. A customized, hybrid approach is also available for those projects that have specific, defined needs.

As the Firm’s processes and procedures become more unified and standardized, the financial return-on-investment is able to be measured with specificity.

Who will train the support staff?

Ideally, the Consultant provides on-going remote and/or on-site support to the current and new staff members on an as-needed basis. Initially, most transitions to a new platform require significant oversight for immediate correction and remediation. As the learning curve begins to decrease, less time for supervision is required.

What is the actual deliverable?

A customized Workflow Manual specific to your law firm is the final deliverable. The Workflow Manual includes diagrams to address specific workflows visually, to aid current and future employees as a go-to resource.